This is somewhat of a newer category, some refer to it as "daily planners", others "time blocking". All-in-all, it's traditionally a calendar app that has put some thought into how tasks, meetings, and event scheduling all affect your day-to-day.
At the end of the day, everyone is on an equal playing field in that we all only have 24 hours in a day. Some people fill that time with meetings, others tasks, and this category asks the question:
How much time do you actually have free in your day? And what work should we prioritize getting done during those free blocks of time?
With that said, the only app in this category that truly checks all of the boxes is Motion, but there are some others that can best be described in this category as they don't fit into any others very well.
Motion in particular started out as a calendar scheduler, then moved into task management, before closing the loop on the time management category. That's when they finally moved into the project management space to be the first project manager with calendar and time management baked in at the core.
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Clockwise optimizes your team’s schedules to create more time in everyone’s day.
Clockwise is clear in their focus on helping teams find focus time. This means that if you're an individual, or a small team that doesn't have many internal meetings, Clockwise is not right for you.
If the main goal that you have is getting your team to have all of their internal meetings optimized to give everyone a calendar that is optimized for focused time blocks, that's exactly where Clockwise excels.
The piece that is most confusing to me when using Clockwise is that they have a "planner", which looks like a calendar:
But when you actually dive in to use it, you realize that it has no actual calendaring functionality. While it allows you to create a one-off event, you can't even edit after creating it—it's literally read only. So there's no editing the title/description, adding additional guests, etc. you'll have to go to a separate calendar app like Google Calendar to make any of these changes.
What it does allow you to do is tag existing events (sort of like an over-encompassing category of the event), update internal meetings as "flexible"—AKA you're allowing Clockwise to reschedule them automatically, and manually reschedule meetings to others based on some recommended schedule times:
This is all fine, it's just something that I continually get frustrated by when using these time management tools. Just like Reclaim, it's essentially requiring you to either keep Clockwise open in another tab, or you're restricted to using Google Calendar along with the Clockwise Chrome extension.
So this is where you need to essentially forego using a modern calendar app in favor of using Clockwise properly (or you need to have both apps open side-by-side).
Clockwise touts AI for time management/scheduling, and it seems they've actually gone a bit more true to this than that of Reclaim. They've done this by incorporating a ChatGPT-like interface for which you can speak to in-place of a scheduling assistant.
They claim you can use it for things like "I need to meet with our CTO immediately", which will then suggest some shifts in both your calendars, and then you can move forward with it.
The only question I have here is, should everyone at the company really be able to have that level of control? To be able to switch around team member's calendar to prioritize a meeting with you? There's definitely areas where this would be cool and impressive, I'll admit, it's just I wonder how much actual usage this will get on the day-to-day, versus it just being a really cool AI demo type of feature.
To be crystal clear (as many don't seem to understand this point at first glance), if you primarily have external attendees in your meetings, you cannot mark events as "flexible meetings" and thus, they cannot take advantage of the automatic rescheduling and focus time optimization that Clockwise allows for.
Clockwise is also not a calendar replacement. So you'll still want to use an improved 3rd party calendar like Cron, Motion, or if you must, Google Calendar (which is actually suggested because of the Google Calendar Chromium extension for Clockwise):
While it has scheduler options, replacing the need for tools like Calendly in most cases, and unlike Reclaim, it actually allows for booking questions, they are just a bit barebones in terms of options:
Clockwise fits in as the most focused specifically on re-arranging internal team meetings, to optimize chunks of focus time for teams. This means, if you're using Clockwise solo, or with a small team (or just don't have that many internal meetings), the value in which you'll get from it won't be all that high.
This is where we're more a fan of time management tools that also have task management baked in at the core, because really, what is time management without tasks?
While a tool like Motion will actually fit in tasks that need to be done during your focus blocks of time, Clockwise is more about trying to find you and your team focus blocks of time.
Clockwise also just reschedules meetings and focused time blocks once a day, whereas both Motion and Reclaim react to changes on your calendar immediately.
We find it generally difficult to recommend Clockwise if customers actually have any meaningful scheduler needs though, as something like Motion or Calendly allows for far greater control in adding more opinionated parameters around the booking link. Like in Motion, since it also manager your tasks, you can set a scheduler link to be higher priority in that it'll actually book over scheduled tasks, and even over scheduled events (if you wanted a high-priority link set).
If you have a large team along with frequent internal meetings and you want to optimize everyone's calendars (why wouldn't you want to at that point?), then Clockwise is great!
If you're more looking for a modern time management platform that covers scheduling links, improves your calendar experience (desktop & mobile), and helps you get work done in the focus blocks of time created, that's where Motion is more of the top pick of the category.
We're seeing with Clockwise, just like with Reclaim, that they are trying to hand off the actual task management of getting work done to a proper project manager, which is what makes Clockwise and Reclaim both in a powerful yet narrow sliver to the time management space as a whole.
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
An intelligent habit and task time-blocking and event scheduling layer atop your calendar.
Reclaim is in a bit of a non-standard category. It's sort of a scheduler and basic task manager with a "sprinkle of AI"—the best way to describe them is as an intelligent scheduling layer atop your calendar.
You may have stumbled upon it when looking for a time blocking tool, which is what Reclaim does quite well.
In-fact, we used Reclaim for nearly a year, evaluating it alongside Motion for our team. The main distinction between the two is that Reclaim is trying to be a smart layer atop your calendar, whereas with Motion, you no longer need to visit Google Calendar (although mind you, both of these tools require Google or Microsoft as your calendar's foundation).
Reclaim's main focus is trying to help you fit in the the things that you want to do from day-to-day, whether that be tasks, smart internal 1-on-1 meetings, or even habits.
This is what leaves them in a bit of an odd spot though, want to use their task management features? Well they are incredibly barebones and things will get quite overwhelming with any meaningful number of tasks because of this. There's no thoughtful prioritization, deadlines, or dependencies.
Rather, they have gone the path of "we aren't going to be a full project manager, we'll just have a basic integration with your existing project management tool".
While this might sound great to some—it starts falling apart quite quickly (for which I'll cover in the competition and final thoughts sections).
Reclaim allows for super basic calendar scheduling (externally and with team members), similar to that of Calendly and Motion although it lacks in scheduler features.
They also give reporting stats on how your time has been spent between work and personal. Another feature that seems cool on the surface, but in actually reporting in on a weekly basis to check it out, it doesn't really allow you to take anything meaningful from it:
The strange thing here is that while we feel like many people are talking about Motion vs Reclaim, Reclaim feels to be more of a competitor to that of something like Clockwise than it is to Motion directly.
This is because Reclaim is in no way a proper individual or team project manager. Even their task management capabilities are incredibly basic. There's no organization/categorization, recurrence functionality, deadlines, or priority setting.
This is where they've chosen the integration path with other Project Managers on the market versus attempting to build it themselves (unlike Motion).
The interesting part of this is exactly what Motion actually tried doing in the early days, a deep integration with Asana was actually the first attempt at task management.
Believe it or not, they decided to deprecate the integration entirely and just build a full task/project management tool themselves, because they realized true AI task blocking required that you have very specific prioritization metrics in order to get optimal results.
For example, you don't have to set a priority or task duration in Asana, so how is an AI algorithm supposed to truly prioritize what is most important.
There's no way to set a task as "personal" or "work", which is important for when it should schedule the task on your calendar—during work hours or on the weekend?
So what Motion realized (and what Reclaim is going to realize real soon), is that the project management integration path is always going to give sub-optimal results, because too much critical context is missing.
This results in Reclaim just throwing random tasks at you from a day-to-day basis that rarely actually fit into what is most important to get done.
We find Reclaim interesting in what they are trying to accomplish top-level, but we find that they go too broad and shallow in terms of feature depth.
What do I mean? Well, using Reclaim as your scheduler has a lot to be desired—you can't even add basic questions for someone to answer upon filling out the booking link.
This makes it impossible to replace other scheduling tools like Calendly and Motion unless your booking needs are quite simple.
Their tasks functionality is more around basic to-do's and there's no way that prioritization logic can be done with just a task name and duration. Doing the laundry may take me 1 hour, but invoicing customers on the 1st of the month, 30 minutes—which is more important though? The shorter one, right 😅
That's the reoccurring theme we're getting with Reclaim—they have a bunch of time management/blocking features, and tout "AI" at the core, but we just don't see it. AI works when you have more data-points around dependencies, priority, deadlines, etc.
And that's where time and time again, we'll recommend Motion if you're interested in all the time blocking features, but want actually meaningful task/project management capabilities.
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
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